New Mexico [antikvár]

First page: patches of snow accentuate the sand ripples at White Sands Nationat Monument. Previous page: the fantastic natural stone formations to be found within aptly named City of Rocks State Park. Facing page: the formidable rock face of Cimarron Canyon, a state park located in northern New Mexico. Nearly everybody in America has heard about Billy the Kid. Authors from Zane Grey to Gore Vidal have written about him, and he has inspired songs by Bob Dylan and Billy Joel and aballet score by Aaron Copeland. He was portrayed in the movies by Paul Newman and Roy Rogers, Lash LaRue and Robert Taylor, to name just a few, and articles about him have appeared in major magazines from the Saturday Evening Post to Saturday Revietv. But for all that, even among fans of the Wild West, naming the scene of the Kid's exploits is often as difficult as remembering Billy's last name. Even though Audie Murphy's movie version of the story was called The Kid From Texas, everyone in New Mexico knew the tmth, and almost all of the state south of Santa Fe and west of the Pecos River to the Mogollon Mountains is still called Billy the Kid Country. And even little kids living between Roswell and Silver City know that the outlaw answered to the name of William H. Bonney. But Billy the Kid also often called himself Henry McCarty, and sometimes he said his real name was William Antrim. About all that is known for sure about him is that by the time he was fifteen he was a well-known juvenile delinquent in Silver City, and that he broke out of a jail there before appearing to answer charges of stealing clothes from a Chinese laundry. He spent the next couple of years working as a cowboy in Arizona and, when he was eighteen, the Kid escaped from jail a second time after a jury found him guilty of murdering a man in a barroom brawl. That led him back to New Mexico's Lincoln County, where he waded into the middle of a range war that was already attracting national attention. On the surface, the feud was between cattle baron John Chisum and small ranchers over water and grazing rights. But the dispute was also between two political factions and conflicting banking interests. On one hand was the U.S. Attorney, who was also president of SantaFe's only bank and the political boss of the Territory, and on the other side, Chisum and his companions, who longed to take control for themselves and started the ball rolling by opening a rival bank. When young Billy Bonney arrived, he got a job with one of Clusum's partners, Jolm Tunstall, but the only fighting that was going on was on the financial front. Everything changed in 1878 when Tunstall lost his ranch after some shady legal manipulations, and when a posse arrived to claim his livestock, Billy and his fellow ranch hands sent them off empty-handed. A few days later, the same posse found Tunstall out on the range and shot him. When the Sheriff refused to arrest the killers, the citizens of Lincoln formed a posse of their own which they called "The Regulators," and one of its riders was Billy the ICid. The Regulators had a quasi-legal status until they killed two of the men they were hunting, then they became hunted themselves. The Territorial Govemor, a charter member of the so-called "Santa Fe Ring," revoked their status, and the posse became a target of both the sheriff's men and the army. VWth that, Billy the Kid was officially an outlaw; he was nineteen years old. Up to that point, he had been just another Regulator, but he made a name for himself when he ambushed and killed the local sheriff on the streets of Lincoln. Now the Kid had a price on his head - $200 dead or alive. In the meantime, open war had broken out and people didn't even go to church without their guns. By mid-July, 1878, the whole town was under siege, and after a fierce gunfight, the Kid and a handful of former Regulators managed to make a heart-stopping